Preview: Age of Empires Online: My Big Fat Greek Empire

To be perfectly blunt, I haven’t given a thought to Age of Empires since the second game was fresh out of the gate. I grew up in a very tiny place and when I was in middle school the internet was still a burgeoning thing. The Dot Com Bubble was still in full swing, but the internet hadn’t quite penetrated to the depths of my tucked away village. My school had a computer in every room, all connected to a central server – and that server had Age of Empires 2 installed.

It was a common occurrence for our teachers to spend the first part of a class lecturing before giving the rest of their allotted time for doing our own work, studying, or whatever we felt like doing. For a large number of us, across the school, that meant grabbing the nearest classroom computer and smashing each other’s cities in Age of Empires 2. After I moved on to high school rules concerning things like that became stricter, and the community of gamers that had developed split up. That split caused a parting of the ways between the Age of Empires series and I.  So imagine my delight when I find out Age of Empires was going fully online; a game being built around a concept of a constantly shared multiplayer experience regardless of how the content is consumed. For me, it was middle school all over.

It’s amazing how reminiscent the actual gameplay of Age of Empires Online is to its predecessors. Queuing and completing missions is the same real time strategy you would expect from a game wearing this name. You produce villagers from your Town Center who collect resources which you need to produce buildings and troops; different units are good against specific types of units, and various researchable upgrades provide damage and armor increases as well as other benefits to your town.

Where it splits from the previous games is the new side to gameplay; your persistent city. Everything in Age of Empires Online comes back to your city. Fresh players to the game receive their first missions from quest givers living in your city, and completing those quests provides experience and rewards that let you progress further in the game. Your city’s level is ostensibly the most important aspect – each level provides you with three points you can allot to new technologies spread out over three technology trees.

This is a key feature; you start out with only the very basic of abilities in your missions, but as you progress in levels you can customize how you want to play.  You can choose to stick points in, say, walls and guard towers to defend against incoming armies while you build up your resources to make an army to counterattack with,  or you can focus more on upgrades to your resource gathering. After your first few levels you automatically unlock the ability to progress to the next Age, opening the tech trees for further customization.

That’s another key feature different from older games in the series. Your ability to advance through the four ages is limited by the level of your city, in both single player quests and multiplayer. The PvP (player versus player) for Age of Empires Online is tied directly to your city. The choices you make on the tech tree come with you when you face off against other players, but the matchmaking defaults to attempting to match you against people in your level range to prevent somebody farther along in progression from showing up and stomping you.

What impressed me the most about the beta, however, was the speed at which bugs are being fixed. I don’t know if it was something already being worked on and was just coincidence that it got fixed a day after I reported it or not, but I noticed and reported a fairly benign bug during my time playing through the single player content, and within a day it had been completely fixed.

And that was the sauce on the already great tasting baklava.